Credit Report Surprise | Oh My Aching Debts

Credit Report Surprises

Posted on April 14, 2008
Filed Under debt |

There are some people who question the ethics of repairing your credit score by disputing debts that you know are yours. I admit that I have some qualms about lying to anyone, and yes, it is lying to the Credit bureau but then, I think about my experience with the worst marks on my credit report and I feel better about it.

I was applying for a mortgage to refinance my house when my lender called me and read me the riot act for not telling him about a judgment against me. I was shocked. I didn’t have any judgments. He sent me a copy of my report and sure enough, big as life, there was a judgment from a company I had never heard of before.

Tracking Them Down

I immediately looked in the phone book for the company so I could call and get it straightened out. They weren’t listed. The address was local so I called information and information didn’t have any record of them either. I finally noticed that the date the service was rendered corresponded with a date that I had been hospitalized for surgery. I called the hospital and they gave me the correct name of the group.

After 2 days of searching, I finally got the company. It turns out that they had downloaded my information from the hospital computer and gotten information that was over 10 years old. The bill was sent to my ex husband’s insurance company and they rejected it. Then they sent the bills to the address where I hadn’t lived in 10 years and that is also where they served the judgment paperwork.

I called the hospital because I had given them the correct information when I checked in and THEY billed the correct insurance company. At this time, I had 100% hospitalization so I should not have owed a penny. The hospital said “Oh, the providers must have downloaded the information before we got it updated.” Now the girl typed the information into the computer while I was sitting there two days before I was admitted.

Did I mention that the company that put the judgment on me is wholly owned by the hospital? The hospitalist group sent me to a collection company to get it resolved. The girl at the collection company was not at all surprised. She told me that the hospital sends THOUSANDS of these accounts to them every month. This is not a huge hospital.

I ended up paying off the judgment because I didn’t know that I could have it vacated and I was no longer with the same insurance company. It cost me close to $1000 needlessly and still resides on my credit report.

The whole episode has left me with a sour taste in my mouth due to the hospital’s cavalier attitude, the hidden company within a company and the fact that this happens all the time to thousands of people a month in our small community. Frankly, I think that a class action suit would be in order against the hospital.

So while I still have some inner qualms about disputing bills that I know are mine, my credit report doesn’t really care about the circumstances that got those bills there. Seven years is a long time to pay for a mistake that wasn’t mine. It’s a long time to pay for the mistakes that were mine.

Disputing old debts won’t help your credit if you continue to have slow payment or defaults on current bills. It will help those who have made a mistake, learned their lesson and mended their ways as well as those who are paying for someone else’s mistake.